Richard Webster, The Idea of Evil and Operation Midland

Carl Beech - sentenced to 18 Years for False Allegations of Child Abuse and Homicide

There is a lot in common between the hysterical allegations at the core of the London Metropolitan Police's "Operation Midland" (2014/16) and the similar hysteria on the island of Jersey in 2008. Both included prolonged investigation into the alleged murders of children decades before and in neither case was the identity of the supposed child victims ever established. The Jersey case (involving the former residential institution of Haut de la Garenne), must have been the first in British history where the police launched a homicide investigation in the absence of both a body and the identity of an alleged victim! 

However the Jersey case was not the first such in the British Isles. Beginning about 1996 there were a series of media charges - and resulting Garda investigations - that Irish children had been murdered by the Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy or Passionist priests. Many of the allegations related to periods when no child dies of ANY cause - so I coined the phrases "Murder of the Undead" and "Victimless Murders". By 2008 many of these homicide claims had been shown to be nonsense and that aspect of our child abuse witch-hunt seemed to be fading away. In fact I wrote an article in 2006 that (wrongly) assumed the whole lunacy was at an end. An updated version - that includes the original 2006 text - is here: Blood Libel In Ireland - directed against Catholics Not Jews!

Accordingly when the Jersey scandal broke on 23 February 2008 I wrote an online comment to an article in the Times (UK) on 26 February and also emailed Richard Webster with whom I had corresponded regarding his 2005 book "The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch-Hunt". He agreed with me that the Jersey allegations (featuring the former juvenile detention centre, Haut de la Garenne) were a reprise of the Irish ones and equally nonsensical. For the next 6 months he was very active in debunking the Jersey hysteria using his blog and also his journalist connections (that I sadly lack). The whole lunacy collapsed in late 2008 and the following are two comments that I made to Richard's article dated 16 November 2008 "Something evil had happened . . . I had to go on' - Jersey in the Sunday papers"

I'm pleased to see that I quoted my first comment to The Times article - made just 3 days after the scandal broke - as it's no longer available otherwise. 

Richard Webster died of a heart attack in June 2011 aged just 60. If he were alive today, I believe he would be surprised and distressed that the kind of child abuse hysteria he helped to demolish in 2008, is still very much with us. OR perhaps the demise of "Operation Midland" and the jailing of Carl Beech has at least discredited the homicidal aspects of the Witch-Hunt?

I have an article on my old website (not blog) "In Memory of Richard Webster"


Rory Connor
20 August 2019


These are my two reactions to Richard Websters article dated 16 November 2008

Kilbarry1   21 November 2008 
It was obvious from the beginning that these allegations were based on hysteria. In a comment on a TimesOnLine article dated 26 FEBRUARY ("Beast of Jersey Paedophile...") I wrote the following:

In Ireland between 1999 and 2004 we had a large number of allegations that children had been killed in industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers. These included accusations in a major Sunday Newspaper of mass killing ("a Holocaust") at Letterfrack in Co. Galway. Not a single claim has proved to be correct. This is not surprising as several relate to periods when no child died of ANY cause. (I call these "Murder of the Undead" allegations). **

One body was exhumed and proved to be a death from natural causes but the resulting publicity resulted in dozens of child abuse claims within a couple of weeks against the institution.

The child killing allegations were not made by isolated nutcases but by major newspapers and by leading members of child abuse organisations. They have now ceased but the people responsible have not been called to account.

What is happening in Jersey looks like a repeat of our Irish witch-hunt.

Rory Connor, Dublin, Ireland

Richard feels that the response of the British media to the latest revelations is inadequate. In Ireland the media simply buried the scandal since they were almost 100% responsible for it. At least your UK journalists can cast the blame on Lenny Harper (who is from Derry by the way) and so they are prepared to give LIMITED coverage to the collapse of this witch-hunt. We should be so lucky in my country!

Rory Connor, Dublin 

** I also coined the phrase "Victimless Murders"!



Kilbarry1    21 November 2008 
Further to comment above, while I support (nearly) everything Richard has said and done to combat this witch-hunt, I am a bit uneasy about his treatment of the concept of "Evil". I don't believe that the underlying cause was an unhealthy obsession with evil. In Ireland the cause was definitely anti-clericalism - and specifically hatred of the Catholic Church. The hysteria has now spread to encompass the whole of our society but it started as a hate-filled attack on the Church - with journalists being the main offenders.

I suspect that in Jersey, the cause was Hatred of Authority. One prominent Jersey politician seems to be consumed with loathing of his colleagues. Also Jersey is a small island with a number of rich people who seem to dominate the economy and politics. Nobody is starving but I suspect there are lots of relatively unsuccessful people who are prepared to use any means whatsoever to bring down the local elite.

Many journalists also loathe authority and tradition and are very destructive types. It's not that they are obsessed with evil but that they are prepared to (literally) demonise any person or institution they don't like. When Lenny Harper made a foolish and premature announcement last February about finding "part of a child's skull", these journalists descended on Jersey like a pack of wolves, determined to discover a vile conspiracy of child abusers among the elite. Their behaviour made it very difficult for Mr. Harper to backtrack and he pressed on regardless of the mounting evidence that his original decision was wrong. In my opinion THAT would explain a great deal of what happened in Jersey - and it ties in with our experience in Ireland!

Rory Connor

UPDATE: 22 August 2019

Eight years after the death of Richard Webster, I wonder why I partially disagreed with his article "Something Evil had Happened" - and specifically his use of the concept of "Evil". I corresponded with him on and off for  a few years and I supplied him with the Irish section of his book "The Secret of Bryn Estyn" - about 5 pages out of 600. He published that section online under the title "States of Fear, the Redress Board and Ireland's Folly". I see that in my second comment above I wrote "It's not that [journalists] are obsessed with evil but that they are prepared to (literally) demonise any person or institution they don't like. Is it the case that I was actually agreeing with him while using slightly different language?

Actually we had a theological dis-agreement concerning the role of Christianity and specifically Original Sin!  I wrote about this in a previous article "Satanic Ritual Abuse in Ireland (and the Shortage thereof) vs "Normal" False Allegations". 

"The late cultural historian Richard Webster suggested to me that the reason Ireland had practically no Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) cases was the influence of the Catholic Church and its strong opposition to Freudian ideas. The Church opposed Freudianism because of the implications for Catholic doctrines regarding sin, free will and personal responsibility. Richard Webster was an atheist (NOT of the Dawkins persuasion) but he was also a major critic of Freud and and believed that SRA was a logical development of his ideas.

"Based on what Richard Webster suggested, I developed my own theory that false allegations of child murder in Ireland are our equivalent of SRA - except that in OUR case Freudian delusions are replaced by open lying. (I am thinking in particular of the cases where no child died of ANY cause during the period in question). However I don't know enough about Freud and he didn't know enough about Ireland to prove anything of the sort. It could be a useful subject for a law graduate looking for a doctoral thesis!"

Gordon McKenzie asked me to clarify what Richard meant and I replied:

"I find the theory behind his thesis difficult to understand. I think he is saying that modern society thought it had dispensed with the concepts of Sin, Evil and the Devil but that Freud was a kind of secular Messiah who brought them back in secular form. One of my difficulties with Webster's THEORY is that he emphasizes that Freud re-established the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. However that doctrine states that evil is a basic - although not dominant - element in human nature and that therefore we are all sinful. I would have thought that this doctrine works AGAINST the modern tendency to see child sex abusers as sub-human vermin. Evil is within us and we are not going to eradicate it by transferring our guilt and demonizing any section of humanity no matter how nasty their behaviour."

I have since read more (although not enough) of what Richard wrote on this subject and he had a different take on "Original Sin":

"The dream according to which human irrationality is finally defeated and replaced by the reign of reason has always been at the heart of Christian apocalyptic fantasies. It was Christianity which fostered the view that human irrationality and human viciousness, though part of our ‘fallen’ nature, were not part of our essential spiritual and rational identity. In the eternity of God’s kingdom which was to be established at the end of history, they would be banished for ever. It is religion, in other words, which has encouraged us to believe in an unrealistic version of human nature according to which all human unreason (traditionally personified as ‘the Beast’, the ‘Whore of Babylon’, or ‘Satan’) can be bound for a thousand years (the ‘millennium’) or somehow permanently excised from human nature. ‘Rationalism’ is, in this sense, the greatest of all the irrational delusions which has been promoted by our religious tradition.

"The muddle we have managed to get ourselves into by our failure to recognise this does not only have intellectual consequences, it is also potentially (and, indeed, actually) dangerous...."

Richard believed that the hysteria surrounding allegations of Satanic Abuse, child sexual abuse and rape  stem from this "secularised Christian" view of human nature whereby human irrationality will be finally defeated and excised from our nature. It's a theory that would be very difficult to prove but we do need to discuss what is the basis of these world-wide witch-hunts.  

The reason why I didn't fully agree with Richard's 2008 article "Something Evil Had Happened.." is probably that I was aware of the implications for Christianity of his theory. I have no difficulty in accepting his view that our current witch-hunts are related to those of early modern Europe (16th and 17th centuries). BUT I see the later as an aberration not as something intrinsic to Christianity!